Parc Spirou Opens This Weekend, But Is It Worth Going?
News broke in 2013 that a Spirou theme park was coming to Provence, France, with plans to open in 2015.
This video appeared on March 3, 2015:
Construction didn’t start until June 2017. Now, the newest theme park in the South of France opens to the general public this weekend in 2018.
Better later-than-originally-planned than never!
It’s Parc Spirou, with all the theming after, of course, Spirou and his friends. Yes, that includes Marsupilami and Lucky Luke and many more.
It’s nearly 10 acres in size, but the plans are to double that size in the coming years with at least one new ride every year.
If you’re looking for it, it’s over here:
My favorite part of the map, no doubt, is that it calls out a French restaurant over to the left. Mais oui! C’est la France!
Buy Your Tickets Today!
The official Parc Spirou website is available in English!
The calendar shows it’ll be open through the summer all the way to September 9th, then weekends only until the week of Halloween, when it’ll be open from October 20th through November 4th. After that, you’ll have to wait for the 2019 season to visit.
Some lucky folks got to go to an early/preview opening, so there are YouTube videos showing the park and the rides already. A YouTube search for “Parc Spirou” will give you a good idea of what you might expect there.
The Gift Shop and the Book Store
Let’s start with the best part of the park:
I want to go to a theme park with a gift shop that has a wall looking like this:
And that’s barely a third of what’s on that wall, alone!
Pardon me while I drool.
The Park Skews Young
This is definitely a theme park that aims at younger families. From all the videos I’ve seen, it looks like the kind of place teenagers would be bored at after an hour, at the most. The rides are all very low on the “Thrill-o-meter” scale.
It’s not quite “Sesame Place,” but it’s not far from it. It’s definitely smaller than that, too.
The biggest ride is “Spirou Racing.” I’m a relatively new roller coaster convert. I’ve only just started to go on rides where I might ever be upside down or drop really far. But you know what? This is tame even by my standards:
My 9 year old would enjoy this ride once or twice, but this park would barely be a half-day stop for her.
Even worse, there’s a height limit on that Spirou ride. You can’t ride it if you’re taller than 6′ 4.7″
I am only an inch shorter than that. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with that little margin.
Simulators
Parc Spirou provides three “Simulator” rides. I don’t know what that means exactly. Is it like “Star Tours” or the “Ratatouille” ride at DisneyWorld Paris? I do not know and the rides don’t appear in any of the YouTube video I’ve seen so far.
The first is “Gaffe à Gaston”, where Gomer the Goof takes you on a virtual tour of the Spirou magazine offices. Can you imagine an “attraction” in North America in which Superman takes you for a tour of DC’s offices? Or Spider-Man of Marvel’s? That might have worked in the 1980s, but I don’t think most of those same park goers today would know they still publish comics.
In France, they know.…
“Zombillennium Dark Ride” takes a break from the core Spirou cast to give you a simulation starring the characters from the book who starred in their own animated movie last year.
And, finally, “Mesozoik Island” is virtual Jurassic Park. VR and park ride folks love a good dinosaur attraction…
Directions
Parc Spirou is in the South of France. The good news is that there’s a water park right up the street. The bad news for comics fans is that if you wanted to hit both Parc Spirou and Parc Asterix, you have a bit of a drive:
That’s a seven to eight hour road trip right there.
There might be a train, but it’s still not a simple day trip from one park to the other.
What I Think Might Be Going On
The project started five years ago, almost. It’s been scheduled for an opening every year in that time. When it finally opens now, it’s only half the size it’s projected to be. Construction started very late in the game, so features likely got cut to make up the time. They abandoned the water ride portion early on to ensure the park could open in June. Part of the delay might have been a lack of funding.
My guess is that they’re opening the park now to bring the money in so that they can afford to build out the rest of the park. They need to prove to investors that this thing will make money. So they open it with less than a year’s construction to build out as much as they can, then plan to grow with revenues and crowds.
They’re expecting a half million people to come through the park in the first year. That’s quite a healthy number, if they can pull it off. Will the people who show up this summer want to come back next year? Is Spirou, alone, enough of a draw?
The gamble here is that they’ll attract crowds. It is a small park, so it wouldn’t take much to pack it full, but can they make enough money to justify its continued expansion?
In a perfect world, I’m sure they would have preferred to open a bigger park to start, but at some point, cash flow becomes an issue.
Also, is it because the park is so small that the rides are so small and, thus, the audience it’s aimed at it is much younger? They talk a good game about wanting a cozy or intimate experience, but that usually sounds like an excuse more than a strategy.
The project feels rushed. The website is a little sparse. They don’t even have a site map of the park on the website. A Google Image search brings up maps, but they look dated. I don’t think they represent the reality of what they finished for this opening.
For the Coaster Geeks
In perusing some of the roller coaster/theme park fan sites, there’s a lot of talk about the current roller coasters all being made by the same manufacturer, Zierer (Germany). They’re not the high end whizbang roller coasters, but they are reliable and service a lot of parks, including Asterix. (They reuse rides, and just re-skin them to fit the park’s themes.)
People in the know in the coaster community sound a little more optimistic than me about the park. They follow this stuff much closer than I do, so maybe I should just listen to them.
Coaster geeks will want to read this interview, with the site’s development manager. He’s very direct with his answers, which impressed me.
Final Judgment
It would be wrong of me to pre-judge a theme park I’ve never been to and likely never will.
However, this is the internet, so here we go:
It’s too small. It skews towards too young a demographic to be of interest to me. Two of the roller coasters look like fun, but I think the thrill will wear off quickly.
That bookstore certainly is nice, but wouldn’t be worth paying 30 Euros to get into.
If it survives that long, it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like in 2022 or so once it’s grown out a bunch.
This weekend, if I could only attend one theme park in France, it’d be a toss-up between DisneyWorld and Parc Asterix. I hope this one gets a chance to grow up to challenge that, because I do like the characters. Marsupilami should be a great character to use for a theme park, too.
Bonus #1: A Very Special Issue of “Spirou”
Last week’s edition of “Spirou” is a special theme park edition, with many comics and articles devoted to the new park, or theme parks, in general.
It’s topped off by a new Jose Luis Munuera cover featuring Zorglub and his daughter. Inside, the first chapter of a new seven part series written and drawn by Munuera begins.
Things, of course, go wrong for Z almost immediately.
I’m still hoping we see Munuera’s first “Z” album translated into English, and now I can add a second album on that stack…
Bonus #2: Whatever Happened to Spirouland?
Around the same time Parc Spirou was announced, word got out about a possible “Spirouland” attraction from the same people who own and operate Parc Asterix.
SpirouReporter.net has a post on it from 2014. Spirouland was meant to be part of a larger mall/complex opening in Belgium in 2021. At least, there’s a pitch video for it. Spirouland appears about a minute in, and is a small part of the overall presentation. It will include the largest movie theater complex in Belgium at 4000 seats total, 230 stores, 30 restaurants, and more.
I can’t find any discussion of it or the larger mall site anywhere. One report says that a water park in the area would be kicked out to make room for the site. And guess what? This is that park’s final season. They’re closing down for good at the end of September.
The developer’s site lists it still as being a project for 2021. (Click on “Loisirs Indoor”, as this will be an indoor attraction at the mall.)
Let’s come back to this in a couple years and see if there’s any movement on the project…
Looking Ahead to the Weekend
In the meantime, I’ll be scouring YouTube in the days ahead for more videos from the opening weekend of Parc Spirou. I hope one of those Roller Coaster sites can get in there and do some POV videos so I can get a better idea of how serious those coasters are. I’d also like to see a walk through of the park to see how it all lays out and how interesting those smaller rides are.
The takeaway from this is, yeah, we’re not as slick as Americans when we’re designing something. Which is kind of infuriating when Yanks take our stuff, polish it a bit and make millions off of it :p (I was just listening this morning to the original French soundtrack of Les Miserables musical from 1980 so that’s a funny coincidence).
Btw, every bookstore in the country looks pretty much like this, even in the most remote parts of the countryside. You should come over and have a look by yourself sometime.
I believe the phrase you’re looking for here, JC, is that we “stand on the shoulders of giants.” 😉
And, yes, if I ever get over to France, I’ll be stopping at every bookstore along the way. I know there’s an amazing BD store in Paris, in particular. “Album,” I think it is? Is that the one that has separate stores for BD and American/Manga comics?
Yes it’s pretty good. No store I’ve ever been to is perfect though, the production is so massive that none is able to carry everything. There were better ones but they died a few years ago, when the economy crashed.
Between Paris and Bruxelles, hard to say where the best ones are. Not far from where I live there is a big boulevard where you can go through 6 different stores (both BD and comics) in a 15 mn walk. It’s like Christmas every day 🙂
Btw, closer to you, Montreal has some great ones as well. Haven’t worked there in a while but they should still be around.
I’m willing to visit both Brussels and Paris to make the comparison and crown one the champion. =) There’s no way I’d get all the way over to Paris and not visit Belgium, after all. But, yes, Montreal is a more likely destination for me. At least it’s on the right side of the country. Google Maps says it’s less than a six hour drive to get there, but that sounds a little too quick for me. I remember family vacations in Vermont growing up that were 4 – 8 hours. Montreal is past that though I guess it’s ALL fast highways, where Vermont gets to more side roads. Hmmmm…
Isn’t there a train line? Back when I worked in Toronto I researched transport facilities both to Montreal and NYC and I believe that rail was one option. It may not be that fast but at least you can read on the way…
I had the chance to attend the inauguration for the website CoastersWorld and you summed it up perfectly: the park certainly has potential but lacked details, shade and was a tad small given the ‘official’ entrance price, which I highly doubt will remain at that level after a few months of feedbacks.
Still very nice to see a new comics-based park open, though! Here are a few pictures of the park on opening day, in case you wanted to see what the park finished really looks like: https://coastersworld.fr/avis-parc-spirou-inauguration-2018/
They told us they were still working on landscaping and some theming elements, thus the result on June 16th might be a bit different from what we experienced.
The three dark-rides were made by Simworx. Zombillenium will be similar to Ratatouille in terms of transportation system, Mesozoik Island will be an immersive tunnel while Gaffe à Gaston will supposedly be a 180° screen-simulator with a custom film made for the park!
Last but not least, thanks for sharing our interview with Eric BOURRA! His answers were really straight indeed, and awe were the first surprise.
Hi Mathis – Thanks for commenting and for the link to the pictures! Good to hear from someone who’s been there. Glad to hear they’re working on the landscaping, because the videos I saw from a week or two back looked really bare. The rides are there, and the fencing, and not a whole lot else. It almost looks like a traveling carnival show that’s only there for the weekend….
They really opened it up as is just to get people in the door and start making money to pay for this things. The developers have had money tied up in it for four years I can understand why they wanted to get a full season in NOW. They should offer it up as a “preview season,” just to set expectations better.
Thanks for the descriptions on the other rides. I saw a promo shot of the animators working on the Gaston ride, so that makes sense that they’re busy animating something for it.
That interview was so good. When you asked about future expansion and he admitted there was no funding for it yet, I laughed out loud at how honest he was. Most people would give a much more political answer to that. He didn’t soften it at all.
Hey JC – Sigh, WordPress isn’t letting me continue the thread. Good point on the train. I just checked and there is a direct line from NYC to Montreal that’s only $69. But you’re right — it’s time-consuming. It takes nearly 12 hours.
In Europe we use trains all the time so I wouldn’t mind that kind of adventure, but I can certainly understand being reticent.
Think how many albums you can read on the trip 🙂 And the view from the window is probably not bad either, great countryside landscapes in Canada. Family trip!
If it doesn’t involve a beach, my wife refuses it as a vacation spot, so… Also, read while traveling with the family? Riiiiiight…..
Hehe funny. I was used from a very early age to bring books on a long trip to keep myself entertained and quiet. That’s just parenting 101, or so I thought; then again I found out my brother and my sister are the opposite with their kids so I guess that must be a generational thing.
Parc Spirou opened in honor of Spirou magazine’s 80th birthday.
This is France and Belgium’s answer to Universal Studios, like how Parc Asterix is France and Belgium’s answer to Disney World, or Disneyland.